Monday, May 27, 2013

Fallout Vault Boy card - with Instructions

I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas lately and I'm gradually coming to the uncomfortable realisation I may have to own up to liking it more than Skyrim. Which has dragons so that's a huge achievement.

This could make a RADical birthday card with a stamp inside... I'm also tempted to frame it.

I've had a few new card ideas brewing in my head now so it was time to use one of those. The method I used to make this card makes it very difficult to reproduce exactly so there is no full tutorial but I'll give you some instructions, if you've got some crafty tendencies that should help if you're interested in making something like this.

First I found a graphic of vault boy/fallout boy and sized it the way I wanted it. I printed three copies on printer paper then printed a copy of his face with no surroundings - cutting his face in cardboard wasn't plausible but I didn't want full printed outlines.

I chose the coloured card from a set of many colours I have so that everything would have the same texture. You could easily use different textures/patterns to achieve an interesting effect too.

I stuck the printer paper templates to the coloured card just outside the cutting lines for each colour and used my exacto knife (and a brand new blade) to cut out the pieces. The dark blue is the full size of the suit, although you could cut it smaller layering makes one piece appear behind the other. If you start with the big pieces you can re-use each template a few times. To cut the face I held the paper template and card with printed face up to the light to line them up. All the pieces were stuck together onto a piece of black card and then trimmed so that any overhang was eliminated.

The base card is 4x6 yellow card in the same texture as everything else. To make the background I cut a piece of printer paper to 4x6 and sketched the mountain and mushroom cloud. I cut the mountain first then the orange section - the template for which I cut down again to make the red sections and then finally cut the grey. By cutting from the same copy of a template I increased the chances of everything fitting neatly.

I lined everything up before finishing but it didn't look complete - I cut the road freehand and then added the road line and the ring to the mushroom cloud.

Some foam tape to add a bit of dimensionality and a shadow and he was done!

I'm very pleased with this guy - I have a few more ideas I'm working on now, including a dalek - I'm not satisfied with my design yet but I hope to bring him (and many other geeky cards) to life soon.